


I Had A Dream About You

by DarkCaustic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcoholism, Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, Self Harm, Suicide Attempt, Therapy, lots of painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 18:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12216684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkCaustic/pseuds/DarkCaustic
Summary: Steve draws Bucky the way he looked that night – a cigarette burn beside his mouth, the makeup smears, stained clothing and messy hair.Even through the lens of memory transposed in charcoal, he looks beautiful.Michelle finds him there in front of the canvas when she comes for their session.Steve looks at the black on his hands and imagines it as blood.“I miss him like he died,” Steve says.Michelle sits on the couch, arranging herself in the graceful way she has. “He’s doing very well,” she says. “You made the right choice, bringing him here.”“He’ll never forgive me,” Steve says.“I think you need to work a little on forgiving yourself.”(A sequel to Lauralot's "Everything Stuck to Him.")





	I Had A Dream About You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lauralot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Everything Stuck to Him](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5671822) by [Lauralot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot). 



> I read Lauralot's [Everything Stuck to Him](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5671822) and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I found it absolutely haunting, so I asked her if I could write a sequel to it and she said sure, so here is that sequel.

 

_XxX_

 

 

_“Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.”  
-I had a dream about you - Richard Siken_

 

XxX

 

He runs with Sam before dawn. All the scars are healed but he still doesn’t like being seen. It’s the only time he leaves the safety of the tower – he doesn’t trust himself to be alone. He’s not sure anyone else does either.

But Sam and his therapists agree, it’s good for him to get out.

Someday, they tell him. Someday he’ll be ready again. To live a normal life. Buy his own groceries, live in his own apartment, ride his motorcycle. Someday, he’ll be there.

But that day is not today.

That day is not on the horizon.

Tony just tells the reporters _No comment_ when they ask why Captain America isn’t on missions.

(Sam was cornered in a bar at VA-friend’s birthday and asked where Steve was. He angrily replied, _Dude died for his country, came back to life and fought for it again. You guys can’t give him some vacation time?_ The sound bite was on the evening news for weeks.)

He doesn’t tell Sam that every time his feet hit the pavement he thinks _failure failure failure_. He breathes it into his lungs like acidic smoke – _failure failure failure_ – and exhales _regret regret regret_.

He hasn’t seen Bucky since the Avengers turned up in mass and took them both to back to Tony’s tower.

Sam sat with him on the bathroom floor while they Bucky from the living room – he was still pretty wasted so it wasn’t much of a fight but the screaming, the screaming—

He doesn’t tell his therapist how he dreams about it. The way Bucky’s voice had gone high and shrill and called him a _goddamn liar, get in here, Steve, you bastard—_

Steve had put his hands over his head and he was shaking while Sam rested one warm palm on the back of his cut up arm.

 _You think your mother would be proud of you?_ Bucky hollered as the door slammed behind them and that was when Steve cracked open with tears.

“I’m no better than them,” Steve told Sam from his spot crammed between the toilet and the wall. “I’m just like HYDRA,” he gasped through tear-stained breaths.

If Sam made any reply to that, Steve can’t remember. He just made him stand up and walk downstairs where they put him in the back of one of Tony’s cars and drove it the four hours to the Tower in New York City.

He doesn’t ask about Bucky either. Knows he’s in the Tower somewhere, too, in a locked apartment several floors below his. They brought in doctors – psychiatrists and nutritionists and someone whose specialty is addiction. “We’re going to help him,” Sam said, simply.

“What’s the point of being a billionaire if you’re not going to rehabilitate a few supersoldiers?” Tony had said in that very Tony-way of his.

And that was that.

Tony sometimes comes and watches movies with Steve when neither of them can sleep. They don’t talk a lot. Tony badgers him into eating junk food with him while they make there way through all the _Die Hard_ movies.

When Sam and Steve get back from their run, they hit the showers. When Steve comes out, dressed but with his hair still wet, he finds Sam and his therapist sitting on the couch in the living room of the apartment he shares with Sam.

Her name is Michelle and she’s a short, middle-aged Asian woman who has apparently been working with Pepper for years. She’s kind and patient and full of knowledge that Steve knows nothing about. He meets her three times a week and almost always cries. Apparently there was a lot inside of him he was never dealing with.

She gives him breathing exercises and coping mechanisms. She helps him talk about his feelings about Bucky – the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that feel like his best friend cutting him open with a razor blade when he thinks about them too long.

“I think it’s time,” Michelle says and Steve stares at her with confusion on his face – she’s never dropped into his apartment early in the morning like this.

“Time for what?” he asks, knowing already that he won’t like the answer.

“There is a car waiting down stairs to take you back to D.C. We’re going to clean up your apartment so someday you can move back into it. When you’re ready,” she adds gently.

Steve shakes his head. “I don’t want to go back there,” he says. “I’ll hire someone to trash everything. It’s all junk. I don’t want any of it,” he says, hysterically.

“Your clothes, your computer, your notebooks, it’s all junk?” Sam repeats levelly.

Steve’s knees stop sporting him and he slides down to sit on the floor. There are cigarette ashes and empty beer bottles and used needles and bloody razor blades and Bucky’s ripped fishnets strewn all over that apartment and he doesn’t want to look at any of it or remember the way it smells.

But there are also his records and his notebooks returned from the Smithsonian and a letter from Peggy and a few recovered photos of his mother—

But Bucky’s in that room with track marks on his arm and strangers wandering in and out in his clothes and there’s a high pitched sound that Steve realizes is coming from him where he’s sobbing again because he’s no better than Rumlow the way he hurt Bucky.

XxX

They don’t go to D.C.

Michelle gives him something for his panic attack and makes him lie back down in his cool, dark bedroom.

That room is completely sterile. The walls are white and the sheets are white and the blankets are a neutral shade of tan. There is a closet full of clothes they bought for him – plain colored T-shirts, sweatpants and jeans. Nothing that’s his.

He doesn’t want anything ever again. He doesn’t want to be himself.

Sam comes in and asks if he wants dinner that night but Steve turns his back to the door and Sam leaves.

They don’t always let him sulk but sometimes they do.

He dreams about Bucky in a hot-pink skirt with a checkerboard pattern on it. He’s wearing huge sunglasses and standing, clean and happy and whole, in the sun at Cooney Island.

Both his arms are flesh and blood and there are no track marks and no cuts and no bruises or burns on either of them. He puts on lipstick in the mirror of a public restroom and kisses Steve on the boardwalk in front of everyone.

Steve startles awake with his heart pounding into his chest and begs Jarvis to let him down to the gym in the basement level.

Natasha joins him there because he’s not allowed anywhere alone but she doesn’t say anything when he asks if she wants to spar, just nods and ties back her hair.

XxX

He thinks about Bucky’s words on the living room floor. How everything had hurt. How he wanted to be ugly. How even there, in that place where it felt like the world had ended and they were the soul survivors, he still wasn’t ugly.

How much Steve wanted to touch him.

Before they found him, he used to dream about taking Bucky out of that icy tank HYDRA kept him in and warming him with his body.

He doesn’t remember his own defrosting. But he wishes he hadn’t been alone.

He doesn’t want Bucky to be alone.

By the time Natasha and him have gone a few rounds, Sam is up and looking for him for their morning run.

He finds them in the gym, Nat and him both sweating and breathing hard.

“If you’ve already worked out, we can skip it,” Sam says.

Steve shakes his head. “No, I want to go running.”

Sam just shrugs. “Maybe I’ll be able to keep up this morning,” he says like Steve hasn’t been pacing with him on every run they’ve taken since they brought him to the tower.

Natasha pats him on the shoulder and goes back to her own workout while he and Sam step out into the pre-drawn chill.

They run in silence for the most part.

Steve couldn’t even explain happened. On their final turn back toward the Tower, he books it off and away.

Sam yells out for him, tries briefly to sprint after him and has to give up, gasping for air and leaning his hands on his knees.

XxX

“I thought I was going to have to file a missing person’s report on Captain America,” Sam says.

He’s sitting in the back of his closet with the lights all off.

“I’m not Captain America anymore,” Steve says.

Sam ignores that. “Where did you go?” he asks.

Steve opens the closet door, enough light spills in from the hallway to show him there, on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest. His hair is greasy from sweat and he looks ragged around the edges.

He has a dark blue, fleece blanket folded on the floor in front of him, tied up in a shiny ribbon. It’s huge and plush and Steve pushes it toward Sam with one hand.

“Can you, can you give that to him?”

“You went and bought a blanket?” Sam asks, confused. “You know the Tower has plenty of blankets.”

“It’s soft,” Steve says by way of explanation. “I couldn’t stop thinking about him in the ice and how I couldn’t take care of him and I just. I wanted him to have something _soft_.”

Sam stares at him for a moment and Steve wants to curl back into the darkness of the closet to get Sam’s gaze off of him, but he doesn’t.

“Yeah, man, I’ll give it to him,” Sam says. “But you know what we talked about with Michelle when you first came here? You remember that?”

Steve nods.

“You’re not a doctor. You’re not a psychiatrist. What happened to Bucky isn’t your _fault_ ,” Sam says. “You tried to take care of him but he needs more care than you can give him and that’s not your fault either. You have to remember that.”

Steve nods and puts his face back against his knees.

XxX

That night he dreams about the Alps. About how Bucky had sat and shivered in the snow during his watch but then crawled into Steve’s bedroll, bringing a draft with him as he tugged the wool up over them.

Steve had groused at him but Bucky had just laughed and tucked his cold nose into the hollow of Steve’s throat. “Payback,” he said and fell asleep.

XxX

The next morning, Steve runs with Sam and on the way back, slows to a stop in front of the fancy, indie coffee shop, just opening it’s doors for the early morning crowd.

It takes Sam a quarter of a block to realize Steve is no longer with him before looking over his shoulder and walking back to Steve, standing in front of the wide windows of the coffee shop.

“You want a coffee?” Sam asks.

Steve shrugs and Sam leads them inside.

Steve orders a cinnamon bun that he insists the barista wrap up.

They walk back to the tower drinking coffee. “You know, if you want to go out more, you can,” Sam says. “You’re not a prisoner.”

“I know,” Steve replies. “I’m not ready.”

“Hey, take your time.”

They go up to the apartment they share and Steve sets the cinnamon bun on the counter in its little paper box.

“Can you take this to Bucky,” Steve says, but before Sam can answer he follows it up with, “I’m going to shower,” and leaves the room.

XxX

He knows that they all spend time with Bucky –he’s seen the schedule on Sam’s phone. Natasha spends the most time with him, a few hours every day. Sam eats meals with him a few times a week. Bruce, Tony, Pepper and even Clint hang out with him, between his doctor’s appointments and therapy sessions.

Steve never asks anything about him and none of them tell him anything.

Once or twice, when he’s gone down to the gym or up to the roof patio, JARVIS has held him longer in an elevator or in the hallway, to keep him from crossing paths with Bucky.

Moments like that sometimes feel like the only sign that Bucky is really alive in this century, and not some disastrous vision he’s dreamt up. (Sometimes, when he sits by the window and watches the cars below, he does wonder if maybe he had a breakdown and he’s imagining the Tower and Bucky and the whole thing and is, instead, in some loony bin somewhere. Those are the days it is hardest not to hurt himself to prove he’s real.)

XxX

When Natasha asks him if he wants to go shopping, he agrees.

“We’ll go on Monday, around nine a.m., that’s when there are few people at the mall.”

It’s still overwhelming. He feels like he just came out of the ice again – everything is too loud and too bright and the music in the store is too much.

Natasha helps him pick out sweaters with soft sleeves and khakis that look like they belong in this century.

When he stands in front of the fitting room mirror, he looks at himself for what feels like the first time since that day he called Sam to save him.

He looks healthier in some regards – put some weight back on his body, some pigment back in his skin. The scars and bruises are all healed but when he looks at his eyes, it feels like it’s a mask.

There’s an emptiness there, in all that blue, a hollowness; a hurt that will not heal.

Natasha smiles at him anyway, and rubs a hand through his hair to push his bangs off his forehead. “You’re getting a little shaggy there,” she says.

“I don’t want to deal with it right now,” Steve admits.

“So don’t,” she says. “Come on,” and leads him back out. He picks out more sweaters – he still doesn’t like being looked at.

Natasha says nothing when he wanders over to the women’s section. He runs his hands down a long, dark-gray, wool skirt and thinks about how warm it probably is. How pretty it is.

Natasha reaches over and says, “This size would fit him best,” and pulls one off the rack.

When they get home, she helps him make lunch and wash and hang up his new clothes and then kisses him on the cheek and leaves with the skirt in tow.

XxX

Steve draws Bucky the way he looked that night – a cigarette burn beside his mouth, the makeup smears, stained clothing and messy hair.

Even through the lens of memory transposed in charcoal, he looks beautiful.

Michelle finds him there in front of the canvas when she comes for their session.

Steve looks at the black on his hands and imagines it as blood.

“I miss him like he _died_ ,” Steve says.

Michelle sits on the couch, arranging herself in the graceful way she has. “He’s doing very well,” she says. “You made the right choice, bringing him here.”

“He’ll never forgive me,” Steve says.

“I think you need to work a little on forgiving yourself.”

That night, JARVIS wakes Sam.

Steve managed to get into the communal kitchen a few floors down and slit his wrists.

XxX

“What the hell, man,” Sam says with a level voice when he wakes up.

“Seventy years,” Steve replies. His arms are bandaged up to the elbow and he’s strapped to the bed. “They had him for seventy years.”

“You were trapped in a block of ice during all that,” Sam says.

Steve feels the tears coming and he’s helpless to it. “I wasn’t when he fell of the train.”

“Listen to yourself,” Sam says, very calmly. “He fell off a train. You were behaving perfectly logically to assume he was dead. None of this is your fault.”

“I miss him,” Steve says.

“I know you do,” Sam replies, softly, reaching over to wipe a tear off Steve’s face with a tissue.

“No,” Steve says. “You don’t understand. I miss _him._ Not that—that man who showed up at my apartment and cut himself and yelled and made messes. I miss _Bucky Barnes_ , my best friend I grew up with in Brooklyn.”

Sam doesn’t have a reply to that. But he stays and holds Steve's hand till he falls back asleep.

XxX

Michelle gives him a new notebook and tells him that recovery is non-linear.

One suicide attempt in the kitchen doesn’t mean he’s not still making progress forward.

(He doesn’t tell her that it wasn’t really a suicide attempt. He’s not sure what it was but it wasn’t _that_.)

Either way, it means he can’t be alone for a while.

Someone is always sitting with him and he’s half-thankful for it, half-hating it. He feels like he's crawling out of his skin like some sort of sick, alien thing. But no one can see.

But, it doesn’t matter. Michelle has given him a task. To draw. To reconnect with who and what he was before the war, before Captain America, before all that.

She thinks it’ll be good for him and, well, she’s the expert.

He draws, first, the railroad apartment he lived in back in the 30’s. He draws it empty – just the walls and floors and dirt on the windows.

Then he draws his mother. Alive. In her nurse’s uniform, her blonde hair pinned back.

He misses her so hard for a moment that he thinks he might collapse.

He draws for hours and Sam sits up with him – reading quietly.

XxX

That evening, when he’s getting ready for a bed, he gets a text from Natasha.

_He likes the skirt. :)_

Sam finds him crammed between the wall and his bed, his phone still clutched in his hands, but the screen is dark.

He kneels down in front of him. “Steve?”

“I can’t remember,” Steve says quietly.

“Can’t remember what?”

“If Bucky was always…” He lets the sentence hang.

Sam shakes his head. “Always what?”

“A fairy.”

XxX

In the morning he asks Michelle if she thinks Bucky trusted him.

“What do you mean?”

“If he liked guys and dresses back in the 30’s, why didn’t he tell me?”

“He might’ve been afraid, Steve.”

“He had to have known I didn’t care.”

“Well, did you tell him?”

“Tell him what?”

“That you were okay with gay men.”

Steve struggles for words for a moment. “I mean. I guess not. But that’s not something you just kind of _say_. Not back then.”

Michelle gives him a look.

“Okay,” Steve replies. “But what if he wasn’t? Into guys back then?”

“So what?”

“He is now. Or, at least he was bringing them home.”

“He was also shooting up heroin and drinking all the time. He may not have picked male partners because he likes men. He might’ve just picked them to hurt himself. James didn’t know he could live a life without pain.”

“So he doesn’t like men?” Steve asks.

“The only one who can answer that question for you is James,” she replies. “Do you care if he likes men?”

Steve looks out the window for a moment. “I don’t want him to like men because HYDRA made him.”

“Sexuality is fluid,” Michelle says. “Maybe the things he's lived through did change his orientation, but that doesn’t make it invalid. But only he can decide what he wants and you should try not to make him feel bad about it.”

“Well, I won’t make him feel bad about it. I would need to see him in order to do that. I haven’t seen him in months.”

Michelle is quiet for a moment. “Do you want to see him?”

“I want him to want to see me.”

XxX

He draws a dozen pictures of Bucky in dresses.

One for every month like some odd calendar.

He mixes it up too. Bucky in a ball gown like a Disney movie. Bucky in a flowery, summer dress. Bucky in Woman’s Army Crops uniform. Bucky in a long, wool skirt.

He paints them all with watercolor and lays them on the kitchen floor to dry in the sun.

He finds Sam admiring them over a cup of coffee and for half a moment, feels guilty, like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and then lets the feeling go.

“I like this one,” Sam says, pointing toward the November one. He painted Bucky in a warm, brown sweater and fingerless gloves. The wind is tangling leaves in his long, dark hair and he’s smiling in a way he never smiled at Steve.

XxX

In the morning, they stop by the coffee shop again.

This time Steve picks out Bucky a blueberry scone and a hot chocolate that he makes Sam deliver.

He doesn’t ask if Bucky liked them or even ate them when Sam returns. He just says, “He thought I was his handler.”

“I know,” Sam replies. “They’re working with him. He knows you’re not his handler.”

“Does he know the therapists aren’t his handlers?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” Sam replies honestly.

XxX

“They’re lovely,” Michelle says when she sees the paintings of Bucky. “You’re very talented.”

“I was good at drawing maps. During the war,” Steve says.

“How does it feel drawing like this?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I feel like I’m not doing anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not helping Bucky. I’m not helping the Avengers. I’m just sitting around the Tower all day drawing nonsense.”

Michelle nods. “You’re taking care of yourself, Steve.”

He feels like he’s going to cry, but he doesn’t. He looks out the window. It’s late autumn. When they came to the tower, it was mid-summer. The late afternoon light looks fragile and cold and he aches for a moment for some place in the past, for some future he’d imagined but had never happened, for everything at once, escaping him.

Then he says, “I think I’m ready.”

XxX

It’s like a warzone.

Or maybe a tomb – a monument to hard time and a terrible place.

It looks like it did the day the left – beer bottles on the floor; junk food wrappers and dirty dishes; bloodied towels and discarded clothing; ashtrays overflowing on the coffee table; forgotten mail and half-filled notebooks; needles; razor blades; lewd DVDs and condom wrappers among other debris.

Steve just stands in the doorway and stares at all. Remembers Bucky holding his arm still while he cut stars into his forearm. Bucky with his lips lined in red. Bucky throwing up an entire kitchen pantry and the smell of bile. Bucky – on his doorstep, back from the dead but not really.

(The old Bucky loved things neat and tidy and rarely got messy drunk. He spit shined his shoes every Sunday and kept his shirts clean pressed and made his bed every morning.)

Sam hands Steve a black trash bag and he realizes, for not the first time, that that old Bucky is never coming back.

It never stops hurting though.

He puts on thick, yellow, rubber gloves and starts first with the bottles on the floor. Sam collects the dishes and takes them into the kitchen. He empties out the fridge, too, while Steve goes through the mail left on the coffee table – trashing the junk and keeping the bills.

Michelle has come along as well. Half for supervision and half for moral support. She collects the clothes off the floor and piles them in one corner.

Working together like that, it doesn’t take long before the living room and kitchen are back in order. Sam loads up the dishwasher and Steve vacuums. Michelle dusts the bookshelf that houses what’s left of Steve’s record collection.

There are still stains in the carpet that will need to be steam cleaned and the smell of smoke is embedded in the couch but otherwise, the place looks presentable again.

That just leaves the bedrooms and the bathrooms.

Steve doesn’t want to go back into Bucky’s room. He doesn’t want to see the clothing and the beer bottles. The sheets pulled off his bed to reveal the mattress and never pulled back up. The dent in the wall where Bucky probably put his fist but Steve doesn’t know for certain.

He doesn’t want to go back into his room either. He’s not sure the dildo ever got pushed back into the closet and he doesn’t want Sam to see it.

He’s not ready to reread the letters from Peggy or look at his mother’s picture again.

Neither Sam nor Michelle judges him when he says he doesn’t want to clean the other rooms today. They just pack up the car they borrowed from Tony and drive back to New York.

Sam asks if there is anywhere he wants to stop along the way – they could get dinner or visit the monuments or something. Steve just shakes his head no.

XxX

Steve doesn’t get up the next day. He closes the blinds in his room and turns off the lights and sinks down in the bed and doesn’t get up.

Sam checks on him when he doesn’t come down for their run. He stands in the doorway with his arms crossed.

“You going to get up today?” he asks.

Under his sheets, Steve shrugs.

“You want breakfast at least?” Sam asks.

Steve shakes his head, “No thank you.”

“Okay, man, call if you need me.”

XxX

He wakes up hours later to someone moving around the room. He looks over to find Sam spreading a dark blue, fleece blanket over him.

“He insisted,” Sam says with an expression on his face Steve can’t place.

“Buck?”

Sam nods. “He said you always get cold when you’re sad. I told him you have proper circulation nowadays but he insisted.”

“You talk to him about me?”

“You’re the only thing we have in common. Well, that and we both think basketball is boring.”

Steve stares at him, unable to come up with a reply.

“Dinner’s in an hour if you want it,” Sam says when it becomes clear that Steve isn’t going to say anything. He leaves him alone in the dark again.

Steve spreads his hands over the fleece. It’s still soft, but it’s worn now. Bucky’s been using it. It smells faintly like vanilla – either the laundry detergent Bucky uses or maybe his shampoo.

Maybe Nat taught him how to take care of his hair and paint his nails and line his eyes.

Steve lies on his back and pulls the blanket up over his head.

He picked the color because it reminded him of that blue coat Bucky wore during the war. He’s not sure if it’s the color Bucky would have picked these days and he feels bad for a moment for assuming that Bucky was still. Well. _Bucky._

A soft, still voice inside of him says, _so?_

_What if he’s not the man you remember? Does that make him any less worthy of love?_

XxX

There is a painting of Bucky in his WWII uniform on the coffee table when Michelle lets herself into the apartment the next day. The paint is still drying. In the picture, Bucky is looking to the left. His eyes are soft but he’s not smiling. He’s framed by snowy branches and the tip of his nose is rosy with cold.

Steve sits on the floor in front of the couch with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He still has paint on his arms and his shirt and he doesn’t want Michelle to look at him. He feels the same way he did that night in McDonalds when Bucky was talking about what drugs they would try next. He feels like he’s not himself but also like he’s never been anyone else – like Captain America and a childhood in Brooklyn were some fantasy he made up. He’s always been this broken man who can’t tell his best friend no.

Michelle doesn’t comment on his spot, just sits in the chair she always sits in and looks at the painting of Bucky on the table.

“How do I make peace with it?” Steve asks.

“Make peace with what?” she asks.

“With him not being the man he was before,” Steve replies.

“You realize that no one is a single, static being. Everyone is always changing. And you realize that that man,” she motions toward the painting, “gave James the tools to survive seventy years of torture. Maybe he’s not the same man he was before, but your old Bucky saved him, as best he could with the tools he had.”

XxX

They decide to clean Bucky’s bedroom.

It’s not as bad as Steve expected it to be – it’s mostly like the living room. Trash and dirty clothes.

They end up throwing out the entire mattress and the sheets.

Steve washes all of Bucky's clothes because he doesn’t feel like, even now, he has the right to restrict that aspect of Bucky’s autonomy. He folds them all up neatly and puts them away in Bucky’s closet, trying not to look too closely at the cusswords, the ripped stockings, the tiny dresses and the patchwork jackets. He just hangs them up and closes the door.

He cleans lipstick kisses off the bathroom mirror and scrubs hardened puke out of the toilet bowl. He buys fancy smelling soap and restocks the shower. He puts out fluffy towels and a sea-green bathmat. He organizes Bucky’s makeup by color and places it neatly in the top drawer. He runs his hand across the clean countertop and thinks about a railroad apartment in Brooklyn. He thinks about a shared tent in Europe. He thinks about a teenage Bucky sitting at his mother’s vanity and smelling her face powder.

He meets his own eyes in the mirror and realizes that maybe he wasn’t listening as closely as he thought he was.

And he realizes that’s okay.

He can spend the rest of his life listening. He knows what he’s listening for now.

XxX

He runs with Sam every morning.

They go after sunrise and only have to worry about the early morning commuters and the other early joggers.

He starts to recognize patterns – the two young ladies who run the same beat as them but in the opposite direction, the red car that’s always at the stop light on the corner, the barista who cleans the windows every morning.

He doesn’t shrink away from gazes anymore. He doesn’t like them, exactly, and lives in fear that he’ll be recognized as Captain America, but he no longer fears people seeing him.

It’s like something shook loose in his chest and he’s not holding his breath anymore.

It’s like when Bucky would coach him through an asthma attack, when he was absolutely certain he would choke and die, but he came through the other side and Bucky would smile with his eyes a little wet (like maybe he was scared too) and then rub his back firm but gentle.

He misses that.

XxX

He paints.

Everything. Anything.

The Avengers. His mother. A fictional farm. Peggy in the red dress. The street below his window. The Howling Commandos. Michelle on the Iron Throne (she’d mentioned in passing once that she was a fan). His mother standing on the front porch. Sam with a literal pair of falcon wings. A baseball game from the nosebleeds.

It feels like floodgates, so many words he didn’t know he wanted to say but he wanted to say them and didn’t have the verbs.

It’s relearning his native language and he loves the smell of it, the feel of it, even when it brings the heartache front and center. It’s like seeing the bruise he keeps bumping into things but he’s not ignoring it anymore.

He’s allowed himself to say, _this hurts it hurts I hurt._

There’s no shame in this.

But, the thing, it seems, is that once you’ve learned to admit the bad things, to eject them like poison in your veins, it makes room for the good things.

And the good things sing loud and long and hurt, a little or a lot, in their own way too, but give you the right to your voice.

And that voice finally comes out, one evening when him and Sam are on the roof after a good dinner with Tony and Pepper and they’re watching the sunset over New York City and he finally says,

“I loved him. Bucky. I loved him.”

Sam looks at him. “You mean like you wanted to marry him?”

“I don’t think I ever thought of marriage but I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to take care of him. Even back in Brooklyn. I wanted to be the only thing he needed.”

“It must’ve sucked when he started bringing other guys home,” Sam says.

“I thought, what’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he want me? But, the thing is, he doesn’t _have_ to want me. I’m not like _that_. My love is not contingent on him loving me back. I still want him to be happy and healthy and I couldn’t help him. I thought I was, but I didn’t. And, I know, I know what you’re going to say – it’s not my fault. I know that now. It was silly of me to think I could combat seventy years of torture. But I should’ve gotten him help sooner. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking you got your best friend back after seventy years. You had a miracle on your hands. And, maybe you needed some therapy all along. I guess I should’ve blamed myself for not suggesting it. Or SHIELD for not offering it or not following up with you. You can’t just come back from the dead and expect that not to affect you.”

“What do I do now?” Steve asks.

“What do you want to do now?” Sam asks.

Steve looks down at the road below, so distant, so small. Like a toy set. Like something not real. He feels the wind around them and thinks about falling and things about flying and thinks about living.

“I think I should clean out my bedroom,” he says.

XxX

He asks Sam to stay in the living room for a moment and Sam agrees. Then he takes a breath and goes inside.

It’s not as bad as the rest of the house – he’d moved things he really didn’t want stolen into the room after Bucky started bringing strangers home. He had clothes piled up on the floor. A few alcohol bottles cluttered behind his bedside table. The sheets were still on his bed but the blankets rumpled.

The dildo is on the floor, still streaked with blood and his body aches with the memory of it.

He thinks about Bucky in a cell somewhere. Starving and freezing and _hurting—_

He almost doesn’t throw it out but he does. It clinks in the trash bag against the bottles and then he tells Sam that he can come in.

He doesn’t ask what Steve wanted privacy for, he just strips the bed and tosses the sheets in the laundry basket and goes to throw the load into the washer.

Steve vacuums and dusts and opens the blinds to let the light in.

He pulls the shoebox out of his closet and Sam finds him, sitting in the middle of his bed, holding a picture of his mother.

“I miss her,” he says.

Sam sits quietly beside him and looks over his shoulder at photo. Sarah Rogers has her hair in curls and her make up done perfectly. She’s in a collared dress and has on a string of pearls.

Steve looks just like her, especially his nose.

“The day she died, Bucky brought me to his house. I was going to sleep on the couch cushions, on the floor by his bed. It’s what we used to do as kids. But I couldn’t stop shaking so he pulled me into bed and piled all the extra blankets in the house on me and he just held me while I cried. I couldn’t stop shivering; I was so cold. He always knew what I needed, just, intuitively. I guess, I thought, maybe I would just know what he needed. I would be able to return the favor after all these years.”

“It wasn’t a favor, Steve,” Sam says. “He loved you and he never expected you to repay him. It wasn’t a debt, it was a gift.”

“I know you are right,” Steve says, tucking the photo back into the box. “But I’m not ready to forgive myself.”

“At least you recognize that you should forgive yourself,” Sam says standing up. “Are you ready?”

Steve looks around the room one last time and knows he’ll come back again. He’s not ready yet, there’s a lot that still needs healing before he can come back here. But he knows, he can come back and when he’s ready, it will be waiting. There's something liberating in that knowledge. 

He tucks the box under his arm. “Yeah.”

“You wanna grab dinner?” Sam asks.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

They go to some pricy steak place, but the booths in the back are quiet and no one says anything if they recognize him.

It’s four hours back to New York, so he can’t order Bucky something to go, but on the way back into town, he makes Sam stop at an Italian place and gets Bucky a huge order of pasta and bread sticks.

“He always loved pasta, he liked to go to this place in Little Italy if we could scrounge up the money,” Steve says by way of explanation.

He gives the box to Sam to deliver and goes back to his room in the tower.

He sets the picture of his mother on his bedside table and, for the first time since he came to the tower, the place stops feeling so sterile.

(Sam reports back that Bucky liked the pasta and Steve feels something warm and heavy settle into his chest and take root.)

XxX

Steve is not prepared the next day when Michelle starts their session with, “James has said he would like to see you.”

“What?” Steve replies, dumbfounded on the couch.

“Yesterday, James asked if you and him could meet. He wants to talk to you. Of course, Steve, you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to. No one will make you.”

“When?” Steve asks.

“As soon as you’re ready.”

XxX

He doesn’t think he’s ever been this nervous in his life. Michelle leaves the apartment for one of the communal living spaces on the floor below and tells both Steve and JARVIS to call if there are any problems. But she says she doesn’t think there will be.

Steve’s heart thunders in his ears. It’s been nearly five months since he’s seen Bucky – since he had Bucky pulled out of his apartment against his will. He doesn’t know what he’ll say to him.

But, whatever Bucky wants to say, Steve will listen. He owes Bucky that much.

He sits on the couch and tries to control his breathing while he waits.

It’s not long until the door opens and in steps Bucky.

Steve’s heart leaps into his throat and a flood of relief he hadn’t expected washes through him.

Bucky. He’s solid and real and _whole._

He doesn’t meet Steve’s eyes at first. He’s a little hunched in on himself. But, not in the way he’d been before, not like he’s waiting for a punishment that won’t ever come, more like he’s nervous too.

He’s dressed in a loose, dark-blue cable knit sweater. It’s clearly cut for a woman but falls lovely and loose over his frame with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s also wearing the long skirt Steve picked out for him. Natasha was right – it looks good on him.

His hair is long and clean, pulled into a half up to reveal his face. He’s not wearing make up, but he does wear a long necklace, and rings on all the fingers of his right hand. The nails are painted a deep, sapphire blue and he has a white, square bandage on the inside of his forearm. That aside, Steve sees no cuts, no track marks, no burns. He looks whole, his skin isn’t as pale or as gray as it was. He’s put some weight on – both muscle and fat. He’s still thin, but he no longer looks like he’s been starving a dark, cold cell somewhere.

“Hey ya, Steve,” he says and sits in the armchair across from Steve.

“Hi Buck,” Steve replies and he can barely hold his grin in. Bucky’s here and he’s alive and no one is hurting him and it’s so beautiful that Steve wants to burst.

Bucky’s left hand runs briefly over the bandage on his right arm and then stops. He rests his hands in his lap and looks at Steve. His eyes are so clear, so blue. He’s not drunk, he’s not high. He’s sober as the day is long and it’s beautiful.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he says.

The air pushes itself out of Steve’s lungs and he doesn’t know what to say, but it’s okay because Bucky keeps talking.

“You don’t have to forgive me and I won’t hold it against you if you don’t,” Bucky says. “I hurt you,” he says.

“I’ve had worse,” Steve replies.

Bucky smirks then and Steve’s heart almost stops with the sight. “You always were a bit of a glutton for punishment.”

“I didn’t want you to suffer alone anymore,” Steve says.

“I know. You’re heart was in the right place and I was an asshole.”

“Buck,” Steve says, gently.

“I shouldn’t have stood in the doorway, that day,” Bucky says and it conjures up the feeling of that day so sharply that Steve’s chest constricts like he can’t breathe again. “I mean, I did a lot of things that were not okay but that was the moment that I finally dragged you down with me. I didn’t care what you wanted and I was so jealous that you got to build up this little life for yourself in the twenty-first century while HYDRA was using me like a tool. I wanted to tear it down. I wanted you on my level.” Bucky looks down at his hands, at the fingernail polish and the glinting metal. “I was a monster,” he says.

“I don’t think so.”

“I wanted you to hurt me so I knew where the lines were but you… you didn’t.”

“I’ll never hurt you, Bucky. I didn’t know what to do, though. I couldn’t tell you no.”

Bucky smiles at him, a tiny thing that lasts only a second. “You did the right thing in the end.”

“I hated myself for it.”

“We couldn’t go on like that. We’d both end up dead.”

Steve shrugs. “You think I built up this life for myself in the 21st century. It was all just motions. I was miserable before you came back. I could be Captain America. I could fight for others and that was it. That was my life.” He pauses for a moment. “I think I should apologize to you, too, Buck. I think I expected you to bring me back to life when you returned. Like I could finally start living because I had you.”

Bucky snorts. “That turned out well for us, didn’t it.”

“I shouldn’t have put that expectation on you,” Steve says.

“I shouldn’t have treated you like a goddamn handler,” Bucky replies.

“So we both fucked up,” Steve says.

“Not like either of us was, ya know, equipped to come back from the dead. I think only Jesus was supposed to do that and even he had to deal with assholes putting their fingers in his wounds.”

“The Sisters would hate to hear you say something like that,” Steve says, a smile curling at the edge of his lips.

“The Sisters would hate most things about me these days,” Bucky replies. “I’m okay with that.”

“Can I ask you something?” Steve says.

Bucky brushes his hair off his shoulders. “Shoot.”

“Did you… did you like men before? Before the war? Were you…” Steve trails off.

“Was I a fucking queer back in the 30’s?” Bucky asks.

Steve shrugs and then nods.

“I tried on one of Rebecca’s skirts when she was at a friend’s house, one night back in high school. My ma caught me and told me that if anyone ever knew, they’d kill me. And that sounded about right to me, so I never did anything about it. But that doesn’t mean I stopped thinking about it. Maybe that’s why I wanted to wear them after.”

“You wanted someone to hurt you?”

Bucky shrugged. “Everyone I interacted with for seventy years hurt me. I didn’t know how to expect anything else.”

“I’m so sorry,” Steve says.

“Hey, I outlived all those bastards.”

“But you still want to dress like that?” Steve asks.

“It’s my body,” Bucky says, but his voice is soft now. It’s a statement, not a dare like it was back in D.C. “I understand that better now,” he goes on. “It’s not… It’s not perfect,” he says, his metal hand drifting over the bandage on his arm. “But, you know, Stark hired good people. They got through my thick skull.”

“You look good,” Steve says.

Bucky shifts a little in his seat, like he doesn’t know what to do with the compliment and Steve remembers that last, awful conversation they had when Bucky talked about wanting to be ugly and instantly regrets it.

“I mean, I’m sorry,” Steve says.

“It’s okay. I guess, I don’t mind if you find me pretty.”

“I always thought you were beautiful,” Steve says again. “When were kids, when we were young men, in the war, in that shithole place of mine in D.C. You were always beautiful.”

“It was only a shithole cause I turned it into one,” Bucky says.

“It was kind of a shithole before you got there,” Steve replies.

“Are you still mad that I’m not him?” Bucky asks, like he was waiting for the right moment to ask it but the moment had never come.

“Who?”

“Your old Bucky.”

“No. People change. I’m not who I used to be either. Do you mind if I love you anyway? Because you were him, because you are you.”

“You love me?” Bucky asks, leaning forward in his chair.

“I always loved you.”

“No one’s told me they loved me in seventy years.”

“I’ll tell you every day if you let me.”

There is a beat of silence that feels like the world is holding its breath before Bucky meets his eye and says, “I would like that.”

XxX

It feels like the final piece of an elaborate puzzle he didn’t even know he was assembling slots into place that night when Bucky sleeps in his bed.

It’s not romantic. Not yet, at least. He can feel the _something_ between them, this tangible thing that has always been there, but it’s not hungry or eager. It’s sweet and slow and puts them on the edge of something bigger, something more like lovers, but they’re not there yet. And that’s okay.

They don’t kiss. Steve tugs Bucky in close to him (with permission, of course) and they curl up under the soft, fleece blanket in sweatpants and t-shirts and let the darkness envelope them.

He worries, briefly, what Sam will think. Or if Michelle will tell them they are at risk of becoming codependent again. That this will, somehow, blow up in his face like everything else this century has.

But it’s the only thing that’s felt truly right. And he finds it’s the only thing he truly wants. Bucky, warm and solid against him, like a lifeline back to himself.

XxX

Michelle tells them to tread carefully but seems otherwise unworried about the relationship. Sam just shakes his head and smacks him on the shoulder.

Bucky doesn’t spend the night all the time – they both still need there space. There are good days and bad days. Days when Bucky says vile things and splits his skin open. Days when he’s sweet and gentle. Days where Steve can’t find it in him to leave the bed and days when he runs laps around Sam.

Someday, Michelle tells him, someday the good days will outnumber the bad. Steve’s not so sure, anymore, but he’s also not carrying around the world like a martyr. It’s okay if this is all there ever is for him, for Bucky. They’ve outlived everyone and everything and absorbed a lot of damage.

He forgives himself, slowly, for the things he couldn’t do, and loves himself for the things he could. It’s okay if all he ever gets is a sort-of-boyfriend who sleeps in his bed one night a week and often needs a shrink to talk him down from his self destructive tendencies. It’s okay. The world’s not perfect and he shouldn’t expect it to be.

XxX

Bucky kisses him for the first time three months later on the roof top patio after dinner. Everyone is there – the Avengers and friends and even Steve and Bucky’s doctors. It’s an impromptu New Years Party that Tony had thrown.

Bucky takes him by the hand to the railing overlooking the city, away from the table where everyone is still eating and drinking and he rubs his flesh thumb over Steve’s lip and pulls him closer with the metal one.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks.

And Steve says, “Yes.”

And Steve says, “Always.”

When Bucky leans in, it feels like thawing. It feels likes falling. It feels like dying.

But mostly?

It feels like living.


End file.
